Former Soviet citizens in Wehrmacht or other Third Reich organizations or captivity.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Barbarossa – German Arrogance

On
22 June 1941, at 0330 hours, mechanised Wehrmacht divisions, supported
by Luftwaffe fighter-bombers, poured across the Niemen River into
Russia. The date had been carefully chosen for its historical
significance. Exactly 129 years before, on 22 June 1812, an apparently
invincible Napoleon Bonaparte had also crossed the Niemen to attack
Russia. However, Hitler should have studied his history a little more
closely; Napoleon was forced to begin his disastrous retreat only six
months after invading, eventually losing 95 per cent of his troops to
combat and the Russian winter. Although it would take longer, and cost
even more lives, a similar fate would befall the German invaders.

Despite
its having started late - the original launch date was May - 'Operation
Barbarossa' initially made fantastic progress, raising expectations of a
repeat of the Blitzkrieg against Poland. Hitler's plan, which he had
been formulating since shortly after the signing of the Russo-German
Pact, called for 120 German divisions to annihilate Russia within five
months, before the onset of the winter. Hitler wasn't the only one so
confident of a German victory. In July, the American General Staff had
issued 'confidential' memoranda to US journalists that the collapse of
the Soviet Union could be expected within weeks.

But
Russia, a vast country tremendously rich in natural resources, manpower,
and a fierce patriotism, was far from finished. If unprepared for the
precise moment of the German attack, the Red Army was neither as small,
as ill-equipped, nor as lacking in fighting spirit as the Nazis'
ideology proclaimed it to be. A month and a half into the campaign, on
11 August, the Chief of the German General Staff, Franz Halder, wrote in
his diary:'It is becoming ever clearer that we
underestimated the strength of the Russian colossus not only in the
economic and transportation sphere but above all in the military. At the
beginning we reckoned with some 200 enemy divisions and we have already
identified 360. When a dozen of them are destroyed the Russians throw
in another dozen. On this broad expanse our front is too thin. It has no
depth. As a result, the repeated enemy attacks often meet with some
success.'
Not only had the Germans underestimated the sheer
number of forces available to the Red Army, they had also underestimated
how well equipped it was. Many of the Wehrmacht's best generals
reported with astonishment and a large amount of fear on the appearance
of the Russian T-34 tank, the existence of which German intelligence had
not an inkling. So well-constructed and armoured that German anti-tank
shells bounced off it, the T-34 instilled in the German soldier what
General Blumentritt later called 'tank terror'. These kinds of
intelligence miscalculations would plague the Germans throughout the
rest of the war.

But possibly the Germans' greatest
miscalculation was their ideologically driven belief that Slavic
soldiers would be no match for the 'Aryan' Germans and that the Soviet
Union, once attacked, would disintegrate into chaos and revolution. 'We
have only to kick in the door,' Hitler assured his generals, 'and the
whole rotten structure will come crashing down.' Instead, the German
invasion - launching what the Russians still call 'the Great Patriotic
War' - loosed among the peoples of the Soviet Union a tremendous surge
in patriotism, both Soviet patriotism and Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian
and other national patriotisms. At this point, nearly a quarter century
after the revolution, and just after the terrible purge years of 1934
and 1940, there could have been little naiveté about the nature of the
Communist regime. Despite a tremendous amount of resentment and
antipathy towards the Communist leaders, the peoples of the Soviet Union
remained, for the most part, passionately committed to the sovereignty
of the state, as well as to the individual nations of which it was made
up. This was a fact which westerners have never properly understood, and
the Germans were to pay dearly for their misunderstanding.

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About Me

Mitch Williamson is a technical writer with an
interest in military and naval affairs. He has published articles in
Cross & Cockade International and Wartime magazines. He was
research associate for the Bio-history Cross in the Sky, a book about
Charles 'Moth' Eaton's career, in collaboration with the flier's son,
Dr Charles S. Eaton. He also assisted in picture research for John
Burton's Fortnight of Infamy.
Mitch is now publishing on the WWW various specialist websites combined
with custom website design work.